Dealing or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues Read online

  I was afraid to leave. I suddenly realized why John had been so insistent on my looking straight, and so insistent on my schedule. It looked like the man had finally come down on Musty. If I took off, one of the plainclothesmen standing near me might notice the car and take down the plate numbers. And then, if he decided to check and found out that the car had been rented that afternoon at the airport by a kid from Cambridge, Massachusetts, well, that’d be Fat City for the narcs.

  So I stayed. And I sweated it, because the bust was shooting one of our little rules to hell. The Three Day Rule. It was nothing more than a rule of thumb that we always worked by: the heat were usually at least three days behind anything that was happening. More likely five days, to be sure, but for safety we usually kept our schedule down to three. So the courier always flew in within three days of Musty’s run from S.D., and got out of town within three days of the pickup. It was cool to work that way, because the heat simply couldn’t move any faster than that. I mean, the heat are only people. They’ve got a job, and for eight hours a day they do it. But after that they go home and watch the box with the wife and kids, like everybody else. And so if you worked full time, the way we did, it was easy to stay ahead of them.

  But here they were, and here I was, curled up in fetal position on the seat, peeping over the dashboard at the plainclothes narc nearest me. He was watching the house. He didn’t look too interested. In fact, he looked bored shitless. The cops-and-robbers glow began to fade close up, and as the bust progressed I got more and more into this dude. He had his hands in his pockets now, and was staring at the street. God, what a drag, I suddenly thought. What an unbelievable bitch of a drag it must be to work as a narc, and spend your whole life rushing around town trying to bust a few druggies. It was a unique train of thought for me to take, because narcs have achieved a certain hard-earned prominence in the mythology of dope smoking. They’re cast as relentless, evil, and thoroughly mindless cogs in the great machine of repression. Wowie zowie. This guy didn’t look evil, he didn’t look like much of anything. Just a tired, dull, underpaid stool for the law.

  But then I thought, What the hell. I wasn’t going to get suckered into that routine again, into thinking of that pig as just another person. Because he wasn’t, and it was dangerous to think of him as if he were. The danger was a personal one. I’d just be setting myself up for a rip-off if I ever got into any kind of hassle with the dude.

  Because if I got into a hassle, I’d still be a person, but he’d have to be a pig. It’d happened to me so many times, that whole riff. Like you talk to any cop who’s hassling, and after a while—if you come on like a regular chum—after a while, he’ll swear up and down that he’s Real Sorry To Have To Do This To You. He’ll tell you that if it weren’t for the blue he’s wearing, he’d take you home to have a beer and meet the wife. But then he’ll lay it on you: he’s real sorry, and you’re supposed to understand because you’re a regular chum, but he’s got no choice but to run you in. His job is to enforce the law. And then it’ll all come tumbling out, all the excuses, all the lies, all the jive about how he doesn’t have anything to do with anything. He’s just doing his job, and he’s not really running you in. It’s the law, and he can’t change the law, he just has to do his job, so … so? On go the cuffs, and on go the masks—and off you go.

  A couple of minutes went by, and I could hear walls coming down inside the house. If they hadn’t found any people, they probably wouldn’t find any dope. But they were giving it the old pig try. When the worst suddenly seemed to be over, I lit a cigarette and sat up. And then:

  “Hey you, what’re you lookin’ at?”

  It was one of the cops from behind the car. The narc I had been watching was startled into action by his voice and flashed me his best piercing narc stare. They both came over to the window. “You hear what I said, boy? What’re you lookin’ at?”

  “Oh, nothing, Officer, I was just—”

  “You were just what? You want to get run in, huh, for obstructing the law?”

  “No, sir, you see I was just driving through when—”

  “I didn’t ask you what you were doing, wise guy, I asked you what you were lookin’ at, huh? Now you gonna answer me, or you want to double-talk the Captain down at the station?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No sir what? What d’you mean, no sir. I asked you a question. You gonna cooperate or not?”

  “Yes, sir, I certainly will.”

  “Then what were you lookin’ at, just then?”

  “Nothing, sir, I was just on the street when I heard the sirens, and I thought it was a fire so I pulled over—”

  “That was a long time ago, boy, a long time ago you thought it was some fire, and I’m asking you now! What’ve you been lookin’ at just now!”

  “Well, sir.” I was scared shitless again. The suitcase was in the car and if they picked me up it wouldn’t take long for them to pick up on what was happening.

  “Whatsamatter, boy, you tongue-tied? Huh? I asked you a question. You gonna answer me or not, ’cause if you’re not I got other places I can ask you, understand?” Suddenly he stepped back and took a fresh look at me. “You a college boy? Is that what’s wrong, huh? College boy, don’t like to talk to no police, think your girl won’t like you anymore, is that it? Huh?”

  I decided the only way out was to kiss ass. “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, sir, what?”

  “Yes, sir, I am a student.”

  “A student. A student, huh? Oh, I beg your pardon, student. I thought you were a college boy. Well, tell me something, student, where’d you get this car, huh? Did your student studies get it for you, or what? Huh? Tell me about this car you got here.”

  “Well, sir, ah, my, ah … my father bought it for me.”

  “Oh, I see, your father bought it for his student.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “When your father bought this car for his student, did he by any chance make sure that his student was a student of driving, or did he just give it to the college boy?”

  “Ah, well sir, I ah—” I ah was ah scared shitless that he ah was going to ah ask me for my license. Ahhhhhhh.

  “What I’m asking you, boy, in plain language that even I can understand, see, even me who never was no college graduate, what I’m asking you is if you know how to operate this vehicle.”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “Well then why don’t you do yourself a favor, and operate it right out of here right now!” He was almost yelling.

  “Well, sir, I was going to do just that, but …” I pointed feebly at the massed cop-cars, which blocked the road.

  “Well, then put the car in reverse, goddamn you, and git out of here!”

  “Yes, sir, yes, sir, yes, sir,” as I started the car up again and backed out of there as fast as I could, and at the end of the street, moving off at good speed, I leaned out and shouted “Fuck you!” as loud as I could. It didn’t make much difference.

  5

  I WAS BACK OUT ON the Avenue again and hot-assing it up toward the campus before I realized I was still hungry. So I pulled into the first place I saw, which was a Peter Piper. Like everything else in California, Peter Piper is designed strictly for cars. You drive up in your car, order from your car, pick up the food in the car, and then park and eat in the car.

  While you wait in line—in your car—you read the large sign that tells you what Peter offers in the way of nutrition. Finally, as the line progresses, you arrive alongside a large, maniacally smiling being, who is Peter. BE READY says the sign above his head in bright neon colors, PETER WILL SPEAK TO YOU. About the time you think you’re ready to punch Peter in his gleaming polished plastic snout, a thick intercom voice barks “Yeah, what’ll it be?” And you tell Peter, and he repeats it back to you, grinning his fixed, idiot smile. And then you nose to the front and wait for the food.

  If you can drive a car, you can go see Peter as often as you like.

  6

&n
bsp; I FELT BETTER AFTER eating, all primed and ready to go. Where I was going to go was another question entirely. I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was going to do next—all I really knew was what I couldn’t do. I couldn’t find Musty. I didn’t know how even to begin to look for him. He was John’s connection, not mine.

  And I couldn’t call John in Cambridge, because he had become convinced his line was tapped and had his phone taken out. I could try to reach him at Sandra’s place, on the phone we always did business on, but John wouldn’t be with her at this hour.

  And I couldn’t go back to Cambridge without scoring something, because that would be a hundred and sixty bucks in plane fare down the drain and, more important, all our timing thrown off.

  Which left me with no leads, no place to crash, twenty-five hundred bucks in my sportcoat, and a connection who was probably busting ass for Mexico, unless they’d already caught up with him. Not a particularly cheerful prospect. So I just drove around Berkeley, looking for somebody I knew and trying desperately to remember a single street address out of the dozens I knew in that town. I’d spent time in Berkeley before—mostly on three-day dope trips like this one—but one trip last spring had lasted a month. It hadn’t started as a month trip, but that’s the way it had worked out. And I’d met a lot of good people—I’d been things and seen places, as the saying goes.

  But now, just when I needed them, the addresses and names wouldn’t come back, and I wound up parking the car in the municipal lot off Channing, so I could walk up to campus and look around. It was late in the day and the Avenue was jumping. The freaks were out in their usual positions: stoned hostile funky greaser freaks on the west side of Telegraph and stoned outasight panhandling peace freaks on the east side. The bikies were lined up in full formation in front of Pepe’s and I could hear some pickets up on Sproul Plaza. I hurried on to see what they were putting down, forgetting that I still had on my Weejuns and jacket. That was a mistake, because I looked like I should’ve been up on the hill drinking keg beer with the jolly mindless frat brothers, and since I wasn’t … The street punks jumped into action, edged toward me; all around me their soft liturgical drone filled the air: “lids, speed, acid; righteous lids” as the street people decided they had me figured. What a drag.

  Up on campus a heavy scene was under way. The Berkeley police were huddled like sullen refugees under Sather Gate, looking as if they were just waiting for the word to come down swinging. And on Sproul Plaza there was a slowly circling ring of picketers, chanting and stomping. Most of them had helmets on; anyone who exercised the right to assemble and petition in this town knew what to expect.

  In the center of the ring a heavy-set, shaded and leathered black man, beret tilted to one side and covered with buttons like a war hero with medals: “Brothers and Sisters, the time has come for us to act. There is no longer a defensible middle of the road. And by that I mean the middle of the road, man, that sit-on-the-fence shit. ’Cause when the long knives come”—it was not a threat, but logic—“when the long knives come, they aren’t gonna ask where you stand, and where you been standin’. They’re gonna know!” He was rapping and flapping his arms, talking to the picketers, turning away to speak to the crowd. Trying to get that old group-solidarity number down before the heat did. There was no middle ground, he said again, no fence left to sit on.

  “You’re either part of the problem or part of the solution!” He shouted at passersby, fringe observers like me. “Part of the problem or part of the solution. The time has come to act,” he went on. “Join the Third World Brothers and Sisters, in support of their legitimate demands for Third World Faculty and Curriculum. And join them now.”

  There was a lot of energy running through the crowd, and I was suddenly uncomfortable, standing there in my Hahvud Yahd monkey suit. The lines were sharply drawn in Berkeley, and everyone understood what they meant: the fight had already begun. Nobody said you had to get on the battlefield, but then … it wasn’t hard to put yourself in No Man’s Land. I looked back at the cops, who were starting to move toward the picketers.

  “… or Donald Duck Reagan or Mickey Mouse Rafferty. And we can’t relate to seeing our black brothers dying to support this pig fascist system in the rice paddies of Vietnam. We can’t relate to that and we can’t stand by and watch it happen no more neither. The time has come to act. Join the pickets now.”

  The pigs were bearing down, and I beat a hasty retreat back across the street. The pickets had picked up on the energy now, and were stamping their feet as they marched, chanting Who are the people, We are the people, Power to the people. Yeah. Get that ball. Fight, team, fight. Push ’em back, push ’em back, waaaaaaaay back. I began to think about how nobody had ever really figured out what four years of high school did to a reasonably healthy mind. Then I saw somebody I knew: Steven.

  7

  STEVIE’S PLACE WAS PEACEFUL AND quiet, in the back of a house on Dwight Way. It looked onto a lot that had once been used for parking but which had, miraculously, fallen into disuse. Someone had planted a small garden and there were people all around, sitting out on their back steps, smoking dope in the sunset and laughing quietly. I remembered my dorm room in Cambridge, which had a generous view of all four lanes of Memorial Drive, complete with traffic jams twice a day, and wondered again why I hadn’t transferred to Berkeley when Stevie did.

  You never realize what you’re missing until you come to Berkeley—and when you leave, it’s easy to forget. The air is light, the sun bright, and you feel tremendously energetic and strong. You also experience a sudden resistance to credibility gaps, realities of life, overdue bills, and other pitfalls of the American way. That’s why the “campus revolt” began in Berkeley, and that’s why it has never made more sense than it did, and still does, in Berkeley: because the people who are striking and picketing are picking up their energy from the land. When the sun shines in that town, life is so outrageously beautiful that a black man shot in Oakland the night before, or a zillion tons of bombs dropped on Quongquong in the last week, doesn’t seem wrong—it doesn’t seem like anything. It is inconceivable, and totally ludicrous. Which is what it would seem like to intelligent people anywhere. The difference is that in Berkeley, at least, the need to rectify the ludicrous offense is as obvious and natural as the presence of the sun in the sky.

  Even the little details show. Like in Boston, if you want to call for the exact time, you dial 637-8687, which in letters spells “nervous.” In Berkeley, the equivalent number spells “popcorn.”

  Stevie brought out a couple of joints and a gallon of Red Mountain. He gave me a joint and then a glass, and said again that it was great to see me. Then he said, “How’s Annie doing?”

  “Okay,” I said. The hooch was good. “Well, not okay. I don’t know. Shitty, in fact. I haven’t seen her for about a month now.”

  “Jeez, I thought you two were really …”

  “Yeah, well …” I shrugged. “I still dig her.” I lit the joint. It was even better. “She’s bumming around with some dipshit from the Piggy Club now. I see her every once in a while on Mt. Auburn Street, smashed out of her mind. We exchange pleasantries and that’s about it. You know. How’s Barbara?”

  “Cool,” Stevie said. “Great chick. Everything’s cool.” He lit his joint and said, “Came out here to get away from Annie, huh?”

  I shook my head. “Not really.” Stevie had introduced me to Annie about a year before, and ever since he’d taken a kind of paternal interest in how we were doing. But hell, I thought, people changed. I’d changed, she’d changed. It had been a good thing but it wasn’t any more, and I didn’t feel like talking about it. “Not really,” I said again.

  “You and your parents seeing eye-to-eye these days?” he asked.

  I laughed and shook my head. I knew what he was asking. He was asking how I could afford the trip out. “Not exactly,” I said.

  “You dealing again?” Stevie asked, pulling a long face. “I thought you quit that.�
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  “I did,” I said, “but John’s been getting into it lately. Pretty heavily, in fact. He’s turning over about twenty bricks a week.”

  “Far out,” Stevie said. “Twenty bricks a week, around Cambridge?”

  “Yeah, everyone’s turning on these days. But you know John. He’s not particularly interested in the details, just the wheeling-dealing. So here I am.”

  “Just doing bricks this time?”

  “Yeah. Just bricks. Ten in the little bag under my seat and away I go. With a free vacation in California in the process.”

  “You ought to knock that shit off,” Stevie said. “You’re going to get busted sometime.”

  I shrugged. “You drive a car long enough, you’ll have an accident.” I took a long hit off my joint. “Anyway, there wasn’t anything else to do. I mean, this is spring break, right? So I can come out here and dig what’s happening, or I can go back to fucking Westhrop to spend a restful week listening to the old man telling me what I ought to do with my life, while the old lady asks me where they’ve gone wrong.” I laughed. “You know, man, you got a moustache and they want to know where they’ve gone wrong. Fuck that. If I started pushing beds across the country and organizing panty raids they’d be unhappy because I was apathetic and uninvolved. You can’t win. Shit, I don’t even want to win any more. I just want to do the things I want to do.”

  “Yeah,” Stevie said, “I’m hip.” He lay back on the couch and stared up at the tinted sky. We were silent for a while, and then he said, “You still buying from Ernie out here?”

  I shook my head. “Ernie’s not too cool these days. He got busted with thirty bricks last month and didn’t have the bread to buy himself off.”

  “Is that right?” Stevie said, sitting up, suddenly interested. “But I just saw him last week …” He stopped. He thought it over. “Maybe he found somebody to post bail.”